The Increasing Role of Business in Education: A Comparison Between Sweden and Germany

This paper starts with the observation that in recent times, there seems to be an overall trend towards enhancing the role of business actors in the provision and financing of education and training in different countries. Of course, depending on institutional legacies and constraints, the concrete manifestations of this trend varies across regime types, but by studying recent developments in Germany and Sweden with a focus on vocational education and training (VET) broadly defined, we reveal interesting parallels in policy and institutional change although these two countries could be considered as most different cases. In Sweden, the rise of the "free schools" since the mid-1990s has been associated with an increase in the number of schools run by private firms in VET. Many large companies (e.g. ABB, Volvo, etc.) have used these new opportunities to set up "enterprise schools", which focus on the provision of theoretical (i.e. mostly general) skills in a firm-specific context. A similar development is taking place in Germany with the expansion of so-called dual study programs, which combine theoretical training in universities of applied sciences and/or tertiary VET institutions with firm-based training. In both cases, firms do invest in general skills, but only in association with firm-specific contents. In the paper, we analyze and reflect on the implications of this trend for the future of skill formation in these countries. Extrapolating from our previous work on the German VET system, we identify an overarching trend towards segmentalism in the provision of education and training.